Vintage Typography Tutorial using Ornamental Styles

Vintage and ornamental typography can yield some truly impressive effects for graphic designers, and have applications in everything from poster design to logo design. Vintage typography can involve ornamental or floral elements, vectors, as well as some vibrant colors contrasted against the background.

Today, we have a great vintage typography tutorial for you to follow along with. You’ll see how to use a scanned image as the basis for ornamental text, and then how to work with stock images and Photoshop to create a vintage typography artwork.

If you like this vintage typography tutorial, check out our other great text effect tutorials:

Hope you find this vintage typography tutorial entertaining and informative!

In this tutorial we will look at the process of creating interesting work “Vintage Typography”, based on the photo-manipulation and collage. The idea to create such work came to me after I reviewed the old photo of the “Ex-Libris”, I really liked the concept of the picture and I decided to revive this work, add bright paints, etc. So, to repeat the effect created in this tutorial, you will need: page image of the “Ex-Libris”, some brushes, some vectors, Topaz Labs filter, the patience, cup of the coffee and about 3 hours of working.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 1

Let’s to begin! To begin, create a new document size of 700-860px. And using “Extras” tool (Ctrl + H), create a vertical line of the center, it will help us to centering the work in the future.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 2

The first thing to do we’ll create the background. This is a simple combination of paper-stock and brushes in the form of paint. Paste the texture of the paper as shown below.

Then create a new layer (Shift + Ctrl + N), select the paint brush, adjust the color to #abad90 and apply some brushing; then change the layer’s blending mode to “Screen” and adjust the opacity at 75%. You should get some like this:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 3

To make the background is more colorful I added contrast and tint of green. To do this, go to “Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Brightness/Contrast” and adjust the contrast to + 63.

In the same way, make a new mask for Hue/Saturation; settings you can see below:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 4

Now we should cut the main element of the image. For this I’ll use “Pen-Tool”, you can also use any other suitable method for you. So, let’s go!

Red mask shows the element that we need to cut from the image:

We should get a similar result:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 5

At the moment our ornament has a very poor quality, so we will use the “Topaz Clean” filter. Settings are shown below:

Now our ornament should look more smooth and qualitatively!

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 6

Now make a stroke at the ornament using the layer style. It will make the ornament is more expressive. Also smudge the pieces of the book using the “Smudge Tool”.

PS. at this stage, you can remove the “Extras”, simply press “Ctrl + H”.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 7

Okay, now create a new layer on the top. Again choose “Smudge Tool” and tick the “Sample All Layers”, configure a soft brush to 4px. and smudge the “EX LIBRIS” inscription.

As a result, we get:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 8

Now select any font that you like, personally, I chose “Rockwell” and write on the clear place “Vintage”. Right-click on the text-layer and click “Rasterize Type”, this is helping us to easily edit the text in the future. Then press “Ctrl + T” and use a deformation. Edit the text to effect of wave.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 9

Okay, now again, using the “Type Tool” write the text “Vintage Typography” at the bottom of the ornament. For the text I used the font “VictorianLetPlain”.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 10

PS. using the same method as the early, I reduced the saturation a bit and added a more brightness.

At this stage, our layers must look something like this:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 11

Now we need to make the letter “A”. For this I have not used any fonts, and just drew it myself. You can use any font you chosen. I used the standart lines and “Pen-Tool”, that’s what I got:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 12

Now when we have a letter, edit his style of this layer like this:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 13

Now is the time to decorate our ornament. For this I used the brushes of different sets. I don’t want you to follow the pattern, so show your imagination at this stage and use any Brushes you liked/Custom Shapes you like. So, create a new layer on top of the “BG Brush” and draw the ornament like this:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 14

Now the most basic and creative part of the work: we need to paint our ornament! Here you can fully demonstrate their imagination based on my steps. So let’s go to experimentation!

To easily focus on the parts of the ornament, I’ll create separate groups (Ctrl + G). All we need is: “Pen-Tool” and “Pin Light” blending mode.

So create a new group on top of all layers. It also create a new layer and put a “Pin Light” blending mode, now select the area you want using “Pen-Tool” and fill it by colour. By following the steps:

Layers should look something like this:

PS. To the each of layers I added the adjustment-mask to changing hues.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 15

In the same way create the other parts.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 16

Using “Pen-Tool” I painted a small detail in the form of ribbons on the letter “A” for efficiency.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 17

To make work is more smooth I used “Topaz Clean” filter with the same settings as the early. But above all create the layers into one layer, and then copy the image, and then return back all layers using “Ctrl + Alt + Z” and paste it on top of other layers. Here’s how it looks:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 18

Okay, now just apply the filter “Topaz Clean” as we did earlier.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 19

For the efficiency we are creating a new editing layer “Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Brightness/Contrast” with these settings:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 20

Now we need to make ornament is larger and make it more colorful. To do this, repeat step 17 to get a new layer with the image on top.

Select the “Dodge Tool” (O) and taking all of this modes of this instrument make a beautiful glare.

Here is our job “Before” and “After”.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 21

To make the image prettier and bigger repeat step 17. Click “Image-Adjustments-Black/White” and adjust the settings as shown below.

I take an eraser to erase unnecessary parts:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 22

To smooth the edges of the ornament and make the colors more saturated repeat step 17. Apply the filter “Blur – Gaussian Blur”. Adjust the layer’s blending mode to “Overlay” and make the opacity to 30%.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 23

Create a new “Layer – New Adjustment Layer – Hue/Saturation” and make the background with blue accent.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 24

The same method, create a new layer “Layer – New Adjustment Layer to” Brightness/Contrast “and add the brightness in the center of the image, and then decrease the brightness on the sides. This step will focus our attention on the ornament.

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 25

I always consider the best options, so in the end, I decided to completely change the colors of the ornament. To do this, I just created a new “Layer – New Adjustment Layer Hue/Saturation” – with these settings:

And once again with the same settings:

Here’s what we have at the moment:

Vintage Typography Tutorial Step 26

This is the final step. I just added a little light, some highlights and corrected a couple of details, plus added a white frame. In the end, we have a finished work.

I hope you liked my tutorial, and you found it something interesting for you.